We lived in Melmoth, Zululand, from 1977-1982, so it is almost 30 years since we left. Earlier this week we visited it again while on holiday, and drove past some of the places we had known, to see what changes there had been. I’ve written about some of the general changes on my Khanya blog, but there are some changes that are also linked more closely to the family.

In 1979 we had a Christmas tree in our sitting room, with decorations, and we put Christmas presents under it. After Christmas we took it outside, and decided to plant it outside the study window. One reason for doing this was that in summer the afternoon sun shone into the window and made the study too hot and the light made it more difficult to work in. Of course when we first planted the tree it was too small to give much shade.

Our Christmas tree when we planted it in January 1980: Val, Simon, Bridget and Steve Hayes

We planted it on 11 January 1980, and it was only a little taller than the children.

A different view of Bridget and the tree

The tree grew quite quickly.

After a year the tree was a bit taller.

But after 30 years, it was enormous, and had two tops.

July 2012 the Christmas tree towers above the flat-crown tree, which in turn has spread to stretch over the house.

Other trees had also grown, and Hammar Street has a much better surface, and there is actually a pavement, which wasn’t there when we lived in Melmoth, so back then people tended to walk down the street.

Hammar Street, Melmoth, July 2012

On 1 January 1981 we planted three cycad seedlings in the garden. They came from Val’s mother (Dorothy Greene) who lived in Escombe, Queensburgh, and had a couple of large cycads, which produced lots of seeds, and seedlings kept growing in her garden. She gave us some, and also had to give us special certificates for the nature conservation department, as cycads are protected plants.

All Saints Rectory, Melmoth, with cycad near the chimney. 23 July 2012

I’m not sure whether that was one of the cycads we planted — I thought we had planted them in more protected places, but perhaps someone moved one, or one of them grew up and produced seeds of its own.

I nicked this photo from Fiona Carson Reddick Symth’s Facebook page, showing her mother’s 90th birthday. Her mother and my mother, Ella Hayes (born Growdon), were first cousins, and last met in Glasgow in 1967, and my mother died in 1983.

Ria Reddick’s 90th birthday party

Ria was born as Ria McFarlane Hannan on 9 November 1921, and married Hugh Cumming Reddick in 1943. They lived in Rhodesia after the Second World War, and their younger children were born their. Their eldest child, Craig, was killed in a car accident, and Hugh died in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Ria returned to the UK in 1966 after the Rhodesian UDI, as she did not want to bring up her children in that kind of society.

Bill Hannan of Durban

Ria is also first cousin to Bill Hannan, whom we met for the first time last Sunday. There are not many of that generation still alive.

Genealogists often speak of a “brick wall” when they get stuck in their research and can get back no further than a certain ancestor. I’ve seen some complaining that they have been doing genealogy for a month, and have hit a brick wall. If that is a brick wall, then ours must be a concrete wall with razor wire on top, comparable with the Berlin Wall or the Israel Palestine one, because ours has been there for 35 years.

When we started investigating our family history in 1974 we got back fairly quickly on the Hayes side to my great great great grandfather Simon Hayes. He appeared as the father on his children’s marriage certificates, and census records showed that he was born in North Curry, Somerset some time between 1782 and 1786. And there we got stuck.

He doesn’t appear in the parish registers for North Curry, nor for those of nearby parishes like Stoke St Gregory or Durston. At some point he moved to Winscombe, where he married Rachel Allen in 1814. Her sister Hannah married Giles Williams in Meare, Somerset, in 1817, and Simon Hayes was staying with Giles Williams in the 1851 census. Occasionally we have found references to cousins or nephews and nieces, and thought they might give a clue, but they always turn out to be related on the Allen side, and not the Hayes side. In North Curry parish there is a record of a William Hayes who married a Charlotte Nott in 1796. He might possibly have been a brother or cousin of Simon Hayes, but until we can find some record of their parents it will be impossible to know. Any useful suggestions on how to break down this concrete wall will be welcome.

Yesterday three people searched this blog for “william allen hayes”, and three people (the same ones?) looked at a post on James Andrew Allen Hayes and Emily Healls.

Now William Allen Hayes was my great grandfather, and I have quite a lot of other information about him that isn’t posted on this blog, so if those people really wanted information it would have veen good if they had left a comment, or contacted us in some other way.

In the same way, someone found this blog by looking for Mary Louise Growdon. I have some information about a Mary Louise Growdon that isn’t posted on the blog, and leaving a comment or sending an e-mail would have made it possible to share it.

Back then colour film was rare and expensive. I was 15, and my mother let me use her camera, a 1936 model Exakta VP single-lens reflex. It was made in Nazi Germany. It took 8 pictures 6,5 x 4 cm on 127 film, and had an f4.5 lens.

My aunt gave me a Ferraniacolor reversal film for my 15th birthday. I took a photo of my mother with our new car, which she had got about the same time.

Ella Hayes with 1956 Wolseley 4/44

The car was quite pleasant , and had all kinds of fashionable features that were abandoned a year or two later, but in 1956 they seemed like an advance on our previous car, a 1948 Wolseley 8. My mother was then working for an estate agent, Arthur Meikle, and was taking a client to see a house when the car suddenly swerved off the road and hit a culvert in Athol Oaklands Road. The external damage was not much, but the chassis was bent (yes, it had a separate chassis) and it was uneconomical to repair. So when she got the insurance money she went to John B. Clarke Motors in Eloff Street and bought its successor, the Wolseley 4/44.

She brought it to school to show it to me, slightly giddy from standing on the revolving platform in the showroom while the salesman explained all the advanced features of the car. There were things like a split-bench front seat and steering column gear change, which meant that you could have three people in the front seat if necessary. A year or two later I and my friends would covet cars with bucket seats and floor gear levers — just like the old Wolseley 8. It made sense, too. The workshop manual for the 4/44 showed an exploded diagram of the gear-change mechanism, with its rods and levers, with 74 separate parts, from the knob at the end of the gear lever to where it entered the gearbox. The left-hand drive model was worse, because this all had to cross over to the other side of the gearbox.

The Wolseley 4/44 was also rather under-engined. It had a 1250 cc engine, a detuned version of one that had been designed for MG TD two-seater sports cars. The MG version had twin SU carburettors, whereas the Wolseley had only one, and far more weight to lug around, especially when fully loaded. To compensate for these disadvantages, it had an elegant interior, with real walnut dashboard and real leather seats. Unlike the Wolseley 8, it had a heater though it lacked the sun roof of the Wolseley 8.

So the picture was taken when it was new and before it acquired many scratches and dents.

Then I got my mother to take some pictures of me with my horse Brassie. He was called Brassie because of his chestnut coat, and the way it shone like polished brass when the sun caught it. I hoped that the colour film might capture that.

Stephen Hayes and Brassie

I had been told, or read in a book somewhere, that a colour photo should always have some red in it somewhere, hence the blanket on his back. Unless I was going a long way, I usually rode Brassie bareback, as soon as I was tall enough to be able to mount him without the aid of stirrups.

The pictures were taken in winter, which is why the grass was dead and brown.

They were taken in Sunningdale. The road is now called Ridge Road, and a little way to the right it crosses what is now called Long Avenue, along which I used to walk a mile along a rutted track to Fairmount School. The track had no name back then but there was a broken down barbed-wire fence somewhere along it with a bit of flattened corrugated iron on which was painted “Pad Gesluit” (Road Closed), so that was what i called it. On the corner corner of Ridge Road and Long Avenue now stands the Yeshiva College. Back then it was vacant. The Van der Merwe’s lived there in a thatched house, which bornt down one day when the paraffin stove caught fire, and they came and stayed with us for a few days.

The land behind in the picture, which was lined by pine trees on the frontage on Long Avenue and Ridge Road, used to belong to Mr & Mrs Groos, who ran a riding school and nursery school, but when the photo was taken the land was vacant and the house had been demolished. The Grooses had moved away to Bramley because their boreholes ran dry. Later their land was subdivided and houses were built there, and I think it is now called Glenhazel Extension something-or-other.

Stephen Hayes and Brassie

We used to live around the corner in what was later called Ridge Road, and the house is still there, though it now has a thatched roof, and when we lived in it it had a corrugated iron roof. It was a 5-acre smallholding, and we had cows and chickens and in school holidays I used to accompany my mother on delivery rounds in the old Wolseley 8. She used to deliver eggs, butter and cream to housewives in the nearby Johannesburg suburbs of Fairmount, Sydenham and Sandringham. Sunningdale was outside the Johannesburg municipal area then, and so did not have municipal light and water. At the time the photos were taken, however, we had moved to a flat in Sandringham, and the hourses were boarding with out former next door neighbours. In 1956 the place was rented by Howard Leslie, an amiable con man, who lived it up, threw wild parties to entertain the neighbours, and scarpered one night when the creditors got too hot.